The Spirit of the Kitchen

There was a time, when the world was small, that a boy could look up to his father with wonder, concern, and laughter. Every motion a father made was filled with symbolism and fraught with magic. In that time, as now, even fathers were not yet used to themselves and, if they were honest, they kept trying new ways to discover the person whose face stared back at them from the mirror, and so it was with my father.

I watched my father search for himself in many ways but his chief preoccupation was with his Italian roots and he sought them assiduously in the kitchen. It was in the kitchen where he sought to link memory and aroma to cook special food ala Nonna. Nonna, which is Italian for "granny", was born Rosa Baresi in 1859 in Varmo, a village in what is now the Italian province of Friuli.

There are grandmas such as Rosa in every family and, I discovered much later, cooking ala Nonna, became a tradition for many immigrants and their children. Our Nonna became for us who followed a giant, mythological figure and her culinary feats became legendary. My father placed her in his kitchen pantheon above everyone else. There must have been something special about her talents because my grandmother was still praising Nonna's roasted potatoes half a century after her death.

Nonna was as close to Italy as my father had come at the time and trying to understand himself through the food she cooked was a way he could understand the part of his spirit that was not of Iowa. To my father, Italy was not just a place but a boot-shaped precipice on the map of his imagination; his father's eager and immediate acceptance of the new, better world he found in America began the next generation's search for itself in the myth and mystery of the past.

My father came by his interest in food honestly; he grew up surrounded by it. His father owned and operated restaurants that catered to mid-western tastes and he knew the joy and the pain of food from watching his father. In those days, few people outside the Little Italys of America ate real homemade pasta, or wolfed down polenta and gnocchi, and you could not buy straw-wrapped bottles of Chianti at a supermarket. America was a Chef Boy-ar-dee place, and so was our house, but there were occasional attempts around our table to delve into the spiritual meaning of food and authenticity.

When the family ventured into the spiritual pathways through the kitchen, it was my father who led us. These special occasions when he cooked dinner found my mother, sister, and I alive with anticipation, waiting anxiously all day, or even through several days of preparation, while he patiently cooked a tomato sauce for hours (for several hours with carrots to reduce the tomato acidity and for several without for smoothness). As I look back on these moments in the kitchen with my father, they are almost like a seance in which by reenacting the remembered motions of his Nonna she came alive. I knew, in my small world as a child, that this cooking was less about food than it was about being. My father was searching for something or somebody who was tied up in Nonna's apron, and I knew that copying her motions in the kitchen would eventually produce a revelation of the spirit.

We all enjoyed my father's search for himself in the kitchen. It swept our family along an aromatic current of ingredients as he experimented on the stove in an effort to duplicate the dishes he remembered from his childhood visits to Nonna's kitchen. I remember my father's sporadic episodes in the kitchen with the pots and pans and the foreign aromas with laughter and with throat-tightening sadness because he was adrift in a sea of uncertain memories without a guide, the most dangerous way to explore the unknown.

My father's desire to find an Italian sheep cheese whose texture and aroma were necessary for his soul began to build slowly but before long it was an obsession. It was pecorino formaggio for which he went looking and it was pecorino formaggio he could not find. His determination finally led him to a little store on Lee Highway in Arlington and he came home with a large smile. He passed the cheese around to each of us so we could properly appreciate his triumph. It was a little triangle that had a creamy center and a tan rind on the wide end. We all thought it was a smelly little piece of cheese wrapped in white paper. I had only seen yellow cheese that came in an oblong box and was put on sandwiches; this was unlike any cheese I had seen before and it was obviously not meant for sandwiches for which I was grateful.

My father treated the little package of pecorino formaggio as if it were a sliver of the True Cross and he secreted it in the altar of his kitchen. Every Sunday, he reached into the cabinet next to the sink and pulled out the little can into which he had put the cheese. He brought the package into the light, and carefully remove its cheesecloth wrapping. He laid it out on the cutting board and pinched off a little piece, held it to the light and then quietly, as if receiving the Holy Sacrament itself, he deposited it on his tongue.

After a few months, the allure of the sacramental pecorino formaggio vanished and it was forgotten. The cheese sat in the can beside the sink "aging", until it could be used in the perfect culinary moment. One day I came into the kitchen to find my mother in her apron and on her knees searching for something. "There's an awful smell coming out of the drain pipe in the sink," she said to me by way of explanation and turned back to her task. Finally, her hand landed on the cheese can. She placed in on the counter and gingerly opened the container and a foul smell permeated the room. The pecorino formaggio, kept as Nonna had kept it, had expired and required a quick and proper burial. Nobility may the be the regal spine of failure, but when you stumble in search of yourself, there are surprising discoveries to be made.

My father had a love for fried cornmeal mush. He bought it at the Safeway store in Westover right after the war in little, square, clear packages through which you could see its golden skin shimmer. On Saturday morning, there would be much joy when my father fried the square of firm cornmeal; while it was still hot from the griddle, he anointed it with real maple syrup. I don' t remember whether it was the butter or the syrup, both of which had been in frustratingly short supply during the war, but I loved the song of that glorious combination of wealth and poverty. Fried cornmeal mush was simple, plain food but it was special in our house in the East because it was a link to both Iowa, where it was basic to survival, and to the myths of Varmo.

Along with the cornmeal mush went stories of Nonna and polenta, the cornmeal dish that was common among the immigrant families from Friuli who lived in the Des Moines my father visited in his youth. Talking about polenta made my Dad hungry for the memory of Nonna and her cooking. Before many weekends passed a big bag of yellow cornmeal appeared on the kitchen counter and it was announced that henceforth we would make our own polenta; there would be no more cornmeal mush from the store.

Soon after the cornmeal mush pronouncement, my father stood before the stove like a priest celebrating Mass. He began the polenta ritual, unknown to any of us, by lighting the burner and placing a big pan of water on it. Once the water boiled, he began to add the corn meal slowly, stirring the water at the same time. Cooking it took a long time, but soon it was ladled onto plates and we sat around the drop-leaf table watching the steam rise from the yellow mound on each plate. Earlier we had massaged the plastic bag in which the dot of yellow coloring gradually spread through the margarine and now we cut soft slices of it and dropped them on the mounds of polenta and began to eat. This polenta was quite different from the smooth cornmeal mush; it was gritty and had big lumps in it. There are times when misbegotten tradition must give way to modernism; cornmeal mush was soon back in the refrigerator. Iowa triumphed over Friuli, at least for a while.

The tomato sauces that labored through time, the lumpy polenta, the exotic cheeses that spoiled, these were nothing compared to potato gnocchi, the crowning culinary achievement of the poverty-stricken Friuliani. Nonna's gnocchi were incomparable, according to my father, light as a feather with a depth of flavor that could only be complemented with a long-simmered tomato sauce.

One unforgettable Saturday, when the world was small, my father set about instructing me in the composition and cooking of these savory, little dumplings. It was a dish I had never seen or eaten and which he had never attempted to cook. He dug into his memory deeply to remember how Nonna made it. First he boiled the potatoes, then he peeled them and mashed them in the mixer. He put the mashed potatoes in the center of a cutting board, added eggs, and flour. This was mixed and kneaded carefully. Finally, he let the dough stand with a cloth over it. In about an hour, he uncovered the dough and began taking little, sticky pieces from it which he rolled into balls and pressed against a cheese grater. He placed each gnocchi on a plate and soon the lump of dough had been turned into soft, little shell-like objects with ridges. While they sat on the plate, he got the large, deep spaghetti pot and filled it with water to which he added the gnocchi and then lit the burner under it. We waited for the water to boil and the gnocchi to float to the surface. The little potato dumplings refused to rise to the top of the boiling water. Something had gone seriously wrong. He turned off the fire under the pot and poured out the water. There was a big sticky glob in the bottom of the pan that was scraped into the trash. I learned much later when I, too, tried to find myself in the food of Friuli that the trick to make the gnocchi rise is to put the uncooked potato balls into vigorously boiling water a few at a time.

I was happy that food was all around me when my world was small and that sometimes it was an adventure on a rough road. It allowed me to learn that, on occasion, food was less important to sustain our bodies than it was to feed that secret place inside us where our true selves reside. I never discovered whether my father's attempts to recreate the foods of Nonna's kitchen had successfully fed that place inside him. When he made the attempts to recreate the part of himself that he thought was hidden, I was not old enough to understand the symbolism of the food, or the necessity for the search.

For those of us who were small in those times, the world is larger now and much different; stores are filled with books that contain exciting and authentic recipes that tell cooks how to use the imported ingredients that wink from the shelves in ethnic markets. With these aids and ingredients at hand, it should be easy to explore your roots and discover some secret part of yourself, but who can say for sure that eating imagined food once cooked by an old woman in a long ago time when the world was small is not the best way to search for who you really are.

--Tom DeBaggio